Ralph Fiennes to direct – but not star in – Rudolf Nureyev drama

Tale of iconic Russian dancer and famous defector will be based on a screenplay by David Hare, writer of the Oscar-winning 2008 film The Reader – but unlike Fiennes’ first two films as director, he won’t also take the leading role


Fiennes’ dancer … Rudolf Nureyev at the barre during rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet at the London Coliseum in 1980. Photograph: Michael Ward/Getty Images

Ralph Fiennes will direct a film detailing a major incident in the life of legendary Russian ballet dancer and famous defector Rudolf Nureyev,

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.

The untitled drama will be based on a screenplay by

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, the British writer of 2008 Nazi-themed romance The Reader. Fiennes, who will not take the starring role, has secured rights to Julie Kavanagh’s authorised biography Nureyev: The Life and hopes to shoot in 2016.

Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union to the west in 1961, despite the best efforts of the KGB. It is not clear which period of his life the film will cover, but there are many to choose from: the defection itself, which took place in Paris with the help of the French police and a Parisian socialite friend named Clara Saint; his tempestuous love affair with Erik Bruhn, soloist at the Royal Danish Ballet; his forays into film via Ken Russell’s Valentino, in 1977, and with Nastassja Kinski in 1983’s Exposed; his stage partnerships with dancers Margot Fonteyn and Yvette Chauviré, or his 1983 appointment as the director of the Paris Opera Ballet.

Fiennes has worked with Hare before, having starred in

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as a German lawyer who once had an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, who was later discovered to have worked as a Nazi concentration camp guard. Kate Winslet won the best actress Oscar in 2009 for her role in Stephen Daldry’s film.

The Nureyev drama is being put together at BBC Films by Philomena producer Gabrielle Tana and former Pathe executive François Ivernel. Fiennes will next be seen in front of the camera as spymaster M in the new James Bond film,

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, which debuts in November. He has directed two previous films, a 2011 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and the 2013 Charles Dickens biopic The Invisible Woman.